Julia grew up poor. Her parents were Polish immigrants who barely spoke English. She was three when the stock market fell and she grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. She never finished high school, instead getting a job to help bring in money in hard times. She was intelligent enough. She continued to learn throughout her life. But, she always felt inferior because she had never finished high school.

After the war, there were some good times. She could spend the money she earned on fancy stockings she couldn’t get during the war. She could go out with her girlfriends. She worked as an artist and illustrator. Then she met a man, married, and stayed home to raise two girls while her husband worked as an electrical lineman for the city. Both of her daughters grew up to graduate from college before that was the norm. She must have encouraged them to get the education that she never had, that her skilled trades husband had never had.

Then one day her daughter, a lady with two masters degrees and a good job, brought a man to meet her widowed mother.

An extensive vocabulary used confidently, but not brashly, can be intimidating to many people. I grew up in a household of readers. With help from my mother and slightly older brothers, I was reading by the time I was three years old, and I never stopped. The more you read and the more widely you read, the greater your vocabulary grows. Since our whole household were readers, we thought nothing of our vocabularies. Especially for the kids, we were cradled in a bed lined with words, often long or abstruse words. Not only that, but we were taught to ask about things we didn’t know, to ask what new words meant. When I was in kindergarten, there was a program put on by the PTA or some such. One of the teachers got up and announced, “It is not unusual for some children to start kindergarten being able to read some words, but we have a child who can read anything that is put in front of him.”

My mother turned to the woman next to her, the mother of another child in the class, and said, “Wouldn’t you hate to have a kid like that?”

Then, I got up to read. It wasn’t from Shakespeare or War and Peace, but the book was aimed at a fifth-grade level.

While many here on Ricochet may have also grown up swaddled in reading and words from birth, it was not true of many of my classmates, children of average people who watched TV and drank beer after a day at the Caterpillar tractor factory. Add into this home culture difference what we would now recognize as Asperger’s Syndrome, and I often rubbed my classmates the wrong way growing up. It wasn’t that I wanted to be obnoxious. I just thought everyone knew as many words as I did, and I took delight in words and in using them. I didn’t have the experience or social skills to know better.

When I was a senior in high school, one of the administrators pulled me aside. I can’t recite the full conversation nearly forty years later, but it boiled down to the fact that a lot of the other kids thought I was arrogant. I didn’t understand that, since I didn’t think I was arrogant, so I asked for examples. It’s hard to improve if you don’t understand the complaint, right?

The administrator was a heavy-set man. He was red-haired and balding. One of his favorite phrases was in the Korean language. He would always explain that it meant, “I’m sorry about that,” but given that he picked it up in the Korean War, I had always suspected it might be a more colorful phrase if directly translated. He hemmed and hawed a bit, explaining that he didn’t want to implicate the students who had said things, and that made it difficult to give examples. After some thought and analysis, though, he shared that it might be because I used words, often large ones, that other people didn’t know.

“Why don’t they just ask what the words mean, rather than being offended by not knowing them?” I displayed my naïvety on the subject of human nature.

“Well, people don’t always feel comfortable doing that.”

“That makes no sense,” I said, perhaps a bit arrogantly, “We’re in a school. We’re here to learn. If they don’t know something, why wouldn’t they ask, rather than taking offense?”

“Nevertheless,” he said, “just try to dial it back a bit.”

Needless to say, being talked to about something that made no sense to me, did not make much of a long-term difference. I tried to pay more attention to my interactions with other students, but with very little social awareness, it didn’t help much. Especially true, since I felt like I was being punished because the other students were ignorant and were willfully demanding to stay that way.

It was not the last time I would encounter that sort of situation with some older and wiser head’s trying to explain the realities of life and human nature to me.

My future wife, girlfriend at the time, did not do much to prepare me for meeting her mother.

She was not much to talk about her family at all. On one of our dates, she said something in passing about her father, and I asked about it.

“I thought I had told you about my father.” And then she still didn’t tell me much, and what I know after more than twenty years of marriage is mostly supposition. I gather that after WWII, he had what we would now call PTSD. He had nightmares. I also gather that he might have used alcohol to self-medicate, and he was not necessarily nice when he had been drinking. He died in his sixties due to a hospital test gone wrong before I had started dating his daughter.

I also didn’t know to ask a bunch of questions before meeting her mother. So, I went in blind. All I knew was that I was going to meet her mother.

I thought the first meeting went pretty well. To show just how much I didn’t know going in, Julia had a withered hand from a problem during her birth. She wore a hand brace. At some point during our conversation, I asked about the brace, “Did you hurt yourself?”

“Yeah, bar fight,” she said. “Fighting over a good-looking man. You should see the other gal.”

At that time, Julia was a sixty-four-year-old woman. She stood about five-foot-nothing, and she was certainly not the most credible bar fighter I had ever met. I smiled and chuckled, and she carried on with the joke.

A day or so later I spoke with my girlfriend and asked if she had talked with her mother since our get-together. She said she had.

“She felt a little intimidated.”

“Intimidated?” I asked “Of what?” I am sure the reader is aware that usually it is for the fellow meeting the parents to be intimidated, not the other way around.

“Well, of you. You have a strong presence and a large vocabulary. She never finished high school and can be uncomfortable about the fact.”

Of course, that was the first I had heard about her mother’s limited schooling.

But also, with the mention of vocabulary, I was having flashbacks to all the times someone had told me that people thought I was this or that bad and terrible thing, because I had an extensive vocabulary.

“Okay…” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“She says that she looked up several words after we left and learned some new ones to her that she likes.”

Whew! Dodged a bullet there. She had been intimidated, but wasn’t blaming me for it and was even pursuing new knowledge. That was a wonderful attitude to find after many of my earlier encounters.

The next time we went to visit Julia, she asked with a gleam in her eye, “Would you like to play a game of Scrabble?”

As I said in the beginning of this essay, despite her lack of formal instruction, Julia was both intelligent and had gained plenty of knowledge on her own through the years. I suspect the idea to play Scrabble with me was a plan to elicit more abstruse words to be culled from my vocabulary into hers. She was also a tough competitor in the game of Scrabble.

Scrabble games became a regular feature of our visits, and Julia and I tended to split the wins, with my wife usually playing to build out the board, rather than to win.

As she got older, my wife often wound up taking her to doctors’ appointments. I knew I had truly won over my mother-in-law as a friend when my wife came home from one of these appointments one evening and handed me a piece of paper with the word “Sesquipedalian” written on it.

“My mother wants to know if you know this word.”

“No, I can’t say that I do. It looks like it means something about being one-and-a-half feet long.”

“It means someone who uses long words or about long words. Hold on, I need to call my mother.”

She called her mother and said, “He didn’t know it.”

She handed me the phone and Julia crowed, “Ha! I found a word you didn’t know!”

And that was how my mother-in-law became the word champion of the world, or at least our little corner of it. Words had brought us together.